Software and/or hardware defects, which are found during testing and/or use of programs and/or hardware, are logged in bug reports. A same software and/or hardware defect may be found by different users and/or different systems. Furthermore, the same defect may result in different errors within different executing instances of an application. As a result, multiple bug reports on the same defect are often filed. Multiple bug reports on the same software and/or hardware defect are referred to herein as “duplicate bug reports.” If test engineers and/or users are not aware that the multiple bug reports refer to the same defect, then each of a set of duplicate bug reports is handled independently. The independent handling of duplicate bug reports creates inefficiencies in the debugging and development process.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.